Ashes to Ashes Dust to Dust
by Tris'sLightningQuill
Summary: "She'd tried warding her dreams—but there was no running from what lay inside that ward. And what she'd seen out on the street today was enough to give the Forsaken nightmares."


The finest powder imaginable would have felt coarse in comparison with this: the granules ran together as smoothly it was almost as if the substance were a rather dense liquid—a water that was cool and heavy, but not wet. The powder itself had little mass: it reminded her of ash so strongly in more ways than one. No, it was the sheer bulk of it that brought the weight. Enough to crush; enough to drown. She stepped forward with a distended motion that carried an almost uncanny sense of repetition: her foot hit the cobblestone and once more it went to pieces as soon as she touched it, scattering into bits so infinitesimal they should not exist at all. Ash blew on the wind, fine grains of it, colorless, odorless, that stuck in the lungs without choking…at least, not yet. She stretched out her hands, and the wind rose before her, carrying ash from behind in twirling waves. The bits collided with the buildings, trees, animals, people, sprawling out before her to the horizon and beyond. The wind did not break over the obstacles—it broke _through_ them. Even the tiny pressure of those specks was too much. Before her, the world shattered, softly, soundlessly to powder. The wind became a howl, whipping at her ears, her braid, her face. The ash peppered her eyes, clung to the lashes, stinging without blurring her vision, just as it clogged her throat and lungs without stoppering them. It made a fine dust over the whole length of her. The wind pushed onwards—onwards and back—its cold teeth raking a world gone brittle and lifeless as sand; at the slightest touch, the things in creation imploded into this powder-fine crystal, its component parts. The wind rushed forward and washed over her back. _He could do this to the whole world,_ Rand had said. Every living thing, and everything that was not alive, combusted noiselessly into pale dust as she watched helplessly, alone and voiceless in a dead world—from Chachin to the river city of Tar Valon, from the Waste and into Shara, far-off Seanchan and Tremalking, from the stilted boardwalks of Tear to the cobbled hills of upper Caemlyn…all came to nothing. Before her eyes, she watched her fingertips fall away like sand in an hourglass. She could not _feel_ it. They did not belong to her; they did not _exist_. For just an instant, the dense powder held a shape that was so like her fingers, her hands, her arms, and began to swirl away on the wind.

She did not have time to scream.

Nynaeve woke, gasping, alone in her bed. Blind in the dark, she pressed both hands to her face, just to make sure that they were still there…to make sure that _she_ was still there. "Oh, _Light_," she gave a soft sob, turning her face into the pillow, mixing the hot salt of her tears with the cold salt of her sweat. She was becoming accustomed to nightmares; they often came now when she slept alone in a strange bed. She'd tried warding her dreams—but there was no running from what lay _inside_ that ward. And what she'd seen out on the street today was enough to give the Forsaken nightmares. Not for the first time, not even the first time that _day_, she wished for Lan's Bond. If she could not be near him, it would be no small consolation to have within her that bubble of _other_ so intimately close, to know for well and true that there was at least _one_ other person on the face of the earth that hadn't gone to dust.

The world really was going to pieces around her ears; just not so literally as she'd dreamed. How many more would lose family to these perversions of the Pattern before it was done? She could not even think. In such a world, it was not always easy to be strong. All right, she admitted to herself, it was never easy. Sometimes it was simply harder than others. Sometimes it was all she could manage to stand up straight and hold the pieces together tightly enough that no one could see the cracks. The cracks ran deep, enough that the separate continents of herself would drift apart if she fumbled for but a second. So she clung so tightly that her knuckles popped: it would not do to go scrambling about for the dropped fragments. And, she feared, they might scatter so far that she'd never gather them together again, and then where would she be? It just all seemed so futile. One speck in the storm, she was blown about on the wind as much as she made any headway.

And yet…tonight there was one Asha'man at least who wouldn't flinch, seeing Myrdraal in every shadow. _I can't start thinking that nothing I do matters_, she insisted to herself once again. Not while hope remained—and small as it might be, it did that. Rand was laughing again. If Rand could find things to laugh about, she _certainly_ could find cause not to despair. She had never been one to sit by, even when there was naught else to be done. At the very worst, one could either lie down and die, now, or persist against the odds towards the final stand. She was nothing if not persistent; Min and Alanna could attest to that. She would not abet the Dark with apathetic thoughts of hopelessness: she would persist, all the way to Tarmon Gai'dan, 'screaming defiance with the last breath, to spit in Sightblinder's eye on the Last Day.'


End file.
